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FEMGEN 93:The Chinese Empire from the Mongol Invasion to the Boxer Uprising (CHINA 93, HISTORY 93)

(Same as
HISTORY 193. History majors and others taking 5 units, register for 193.) A survey of Chinese history from the 11th century to the collapse of the imperial state in 1911. Topics include absolutism, gentry society, popular culture, gender and sexuality, steppe nomads, the Jesuits in China, peasant rebellion, ethnic conflict, opium, and the impact of Western imperialism.

This class is structured around three motifs: love suicide (as a romantic ideal), female desire, and same-sex sexuality. Over the course of the quarter we will look at how these motifs are treated in the art and entertainment from three different moments of Japanese history: the Edo period (1615-1868), the modern period (1920-65), and the contemporary period (1965-present). We will start by focusing on the most traditional representations of these topics. Subsequently, we will consider how later artists and entertainers revisited the conventional treatments of these motifs, informing them with new meanings and social significance. We will devote particular attention to how this material comments upon issues of gender, sexuality, and human relationships in the context of Japan. Informing our perspective will be feminist and queer theories of reading and interpretation.

Introduction to the comparative literary study of important gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, and transgender writers and their changing social, political, and cultural contexts from the 1880s to today: Oscar Wilde, Rachilde, Radclyffe Hall, Djuna Barnes, James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Jeanette Winterson, Alison Bechdel and others, discussed in the context of 20th-century feminist and queer literary and social theories of gender and sexuality. Note: To be eligible for WAYS credit, you must take the course 110 or 110X for a Letter Grade.

FEMGEN 113:Transgender Studies (FEMGEN 213)

Transgender and gender-expansive identities are the subject of growing attention and (often sensationalist) interest in the media as well as in the healthcare field, yet there exists a dearth of legitimate academic courses, research and writing that reflect and explore gender identity and expression as a fluid spectrum rather than a fixed binary. This course will address transgender and gender expansive identities from historical, medical, literary, developmental and sociopolitical perspectives.

Last offered: Winter 2016
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

FEMGEN 115:Queer Reading and Queer Writing in Early Modern England

Considers the possibility of identifying queer reading and writing practices in early modern England as well the theoretical and historical obstacles such a project necessarily encounters. Focus on the role which Renaissance discourses of desire continue to play in our negotiations of homo/erotic subjectivity, identity politics, and sexual and gender difference. Study of Renaissance queerness in relation to the classical tradition on the one hand and the contemporary discourses of religion, law, and politics on the other. Readings include plays, poems, and prose narratives as well as letters, pamphlets, and ephemeral literature. Both major and minor authors will be represented.

FEMGEN 126D:Victorian Sex

How can we make sense of a culture of extraordinary sexual repression that nevertheless seemed fully preoccupied with sex? Examination of the depictions of sex in Victorian literary and cultural texts. Authors include: Collins, Braddon, the Brownings, Swinburne, Stoker and Wilde.

What role do Jewish and Christian traditions play in shaping understandings of gender differences? Is gender always imagined as dual, male and female? This course explores the variety of ways in which Jewish and Christian traditions - often in conversation with and against each other - have shaped gender identities and sexual politics. We will explore the central role that issues around marriage and reproduction played in this conversation. Perhaps surprisingly, early Jews and Christian also espoused deep interest in writing about 'eunuchs' and 'androgynes,' as they thought about Jewish and Christian ways of being a man or a woman. We will examine the variety of these early conversations, and the contemporary Jewish and Christian discussions of feminist, queer, trans- and intersex based on them.

FEMGEN 134:The Marriage Plot (ENGLISH 134)

The centrality of the marriage plot in the development of the British novel beginning in the 18th century with Samuel Richardson's
Pamela and ending with Woolf's modernist novel
Mrs. Dalloway. The relationship between novelistic plotting and the development of female characters into marriageable women. What is the relationship between the novel and feminine subjectivity? What aspects of marriage make it work as a plotting device? What kinds of marriages do marriage plots allow? Is the development of women's political agency related to their prominence in the novel form?

2017-2018 Spring

FEMGEN 144F:Female Modernists: Women Writers in Paris Between the Wars

The course will focus on expatriate women writers - American and British - who lived and wrote in Paris between the wars. Among them: Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Margaret Anderson, Janet Flanner, Natalie Barney, Kay Boyle, Mina Loy, Romaine Brooks, Mary Butts, Radclyffe Hall, Colette, and Jean Rhys. A central theme will be Paris as a lure and inspiration for bohemian female modernists, and the various alternative and emancipatory literary communities they created.

This course examines social conflicts and political controversies in American culture through the lens of visual art and photography. We consider how visual images both reflect and participate in the social and political life of the nation and how the terms of citizenship have been represented¿and, at times, contested¿by artists throughout the first half of the 20th century. The class explores the relation between American art and the body politic by focusing on issues of poverty, war, censorship, consumerism, class identity, and racial division.